City born, country drawn

"In front of my friends, we listened to Biggie Smalls and Tupac," she recently recalled, sliding into a stage whisper. "I never told anybody that at home I was listening to the Dixie Chicks."

Toussaint's crush on country began on her family's summer road trips, when that high, lonesome sound was all their station wagon's radio could dial in. Once back home, the teenager kept quiet about the passion she felt would ostracize her, and country music was a cultural curse made worse by the fact that Toussaint was a promising pop singer, performing alongside a young Jennifer Hudson.

"You're supposed to be Mary J. Blige, a hip-hop queen," her brother Mustafa Abdullah remembers telling Toussaint when she first informed him that her heart ached not for Nas but Nashville.

"No," Abdullah pleaded with her, pointing out that the family had a musical pedigree to maintain: He works as a popular Chicago hip-hop DJ, and uncle Allen Toussaint is a well-known R&B pianist.

Still, "it took a while before I could actually sing my original material in front of people without peeing myself."

This summer, Toussaint plans to release an album titled "My Name Is Liz," where she sings of being a "City Girl with a Country Soul."

Like other country records, the album is full of songs about tough times, lost love and gunfighting, although this single mother of two ain't just whistling Dixie.

Recently, "someone was shot down on my corner," said Toussaint, who now lives in West Pullman.

"It's real out here!"

If Toussaint's forthcoming album manages to succeed, it'll put her in rarefied company as a black country singer: Only two of the Country Music Hall of Fame's 105 members are black, and the last time an African-American artist had a hit on the country charts, before Darius Rucker this year, was Charley Pride in 1983.

"And let's be honest, Darius Rucker wouldn't be there if he wasn't in Hootie & the Blowfish," said Frankie Staton, who runs the Black Country Music Association out of her Nashville home.

"I've seen [black performers] come and go, I've been at the bedside of those who died trying to make it happen and didn't, but that shouldn't dissuade Liz from trying."

Toussaint said she's no stranger to discrimination. When she first sent her demos and head shot to country-friendly clubs, no one responded.

"When we would follow up with them, they would say, 'Yeah, we got your package. We don't book rap acts.' They claimed they listened to it, but there's no way."

Even now, after performing across the Midwest and recording her album at Premier Point Recording Studios, one of Chicago's best, she worries that mainstream country won't accept her, even if she does twang with the best of them.

"Because I listen to country music, because I watch CMT, because I know how serious country fans are, I'm kind of skeptical about going there and saying, 'Hey, I'm from Chicago. I ride horses on vacation.'"

Watching her work, you'd never know the pint-size performer occasionally doubts how she'll be accepted in the genre. In the studio, she produces her own tracks with passionate fervor, tweaking guitar licks and hand claps, fiddling with fiddle runs for hours.

"She's the smallest one in the group, but she runs everything," said Al Stevens, her manager, who is also releasing her album. "She can tell you exactly what she's looking for."

Walter English, who plays piano in Toussaint's band, predicts she'll soon not only grab country fans, but bring in new listeners as well.

"I never listened to country before Liz either, but my explanation is that Liz is like that food your parents put on your plate and you didn't want it because you didn't recognize it," he said. "Once you tried it, though, you love it."

Her brother Abdullah puts it another way: "Think about hip-hop. It used to be just an urban thing, but now the suburban kids know more than we do.